The Great Migration by Jacob LawrenceAfter an introduction from the artist about the migration of blacks from the rural areas in the South to the urban, industrialized North, there follows a collection of paintings that capture images of these events. A brief text connects the pictures, which were painted in the early 1940s. These are powerful images showing the difficulties of the journey as well as the strong support of families & friends. Many audiences will want to examine this visual history. A poem, "Migration" by Walter Dean Myers, follows the illustrations.
ISBN: 0060230371
Publication Date: 1993
Over the Line by Peter T. Nesbett (Editor); Michelle DuBois (Editor)Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence includes essays by eight distinguished art historians examining the ways in which Jacob Lawrence's art speaks so powerfully to different audiences. It is the first multi-author, in-depth probe of the artist's entire career: the nature of his work, his education, the critical climate in which he worked, and his use of materials and techniques. It reproduces, in full color, more than 200 works, most of which have not been published in color, or at all, in other books on the artist. An extensive chronology, collating events in his life with his public reception -- including selected exhibitions, publications, honors, and awards -- is illustrated with family photographs. Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) spent his childhood in New York City, attending classes at the Harlem Community Art Center and the American Artists School, and later working for the Federal Art Project. While still in his twenties Lawrence exhibited his paintings at major museums across the country, including the Phillips Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he became the first African American artist represented in the permanent collection. He lived, painted, and taught in New York City until 1971, when he moved to Seattle to join the faculty of the University of Washington. He was the recipient of numerous awards including the National Medal of Arts. The paperback edition of Over the Line is published in conjunction with a major exhibition opening at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, on May 26, 2001, and traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
ISBN: 029597964X
Publication Date: 2000
Painting Harlem Modern by Patricia HillsJacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. In Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills renders a vivid assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. She argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists. She also uniquely positions Lawrence alongside such important African American writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Drawing from a wide range of archival materials and interviews with artists, Hills interprets Lawrence's art as distilled from a life of struggle and perseverance. She brings insightful analysis to his work, beginning with the 1930s street scenes that provided Harlem with its pictorial image, and follows each decade of Lawrence's work, with accounts that include his impressions of Southern Jim Crow segregation and a groundbreaking discussion of Lawrence's symbolic use of masks and masking during the 1950s Cold War era. Painting Harlem Modern is an absorbing book that highlights Lawrence's heroic efforts to meet his many challenges while remaining true to his humanist values and artistic vision.
ISBN: 9780520252417
Publication Date: 2010
Jacob Lawrence by Elizabeth Hutton Turner (Editor); Austen Barron Bailly (Editor)This publication sets the precedent for the next generation of Lawrence scholars and studies in modern and contemporary discourse. The American Struggle explores Jacob Lawrence?s radical way of transforming history into art by looking at his thirty panel series of paintings, Struggle . . . from the History of the American People (1954?56). Essays by Steven Locke, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Austen Barron Bailly, and Lydia Gordon mark the historic reunion of this series?seen together in this exhibition for the first time since 1958. In entries on the panels, a multitude of voices responds to the episodes representing struggle from American history that Lawrence chose to activate in his series. The American Struggle reexamines Lawrence?s lost narrative and its power for twenty-first century audiences by including contemporary art and artists. Derrick Adams, Bethany Collins, and Hank Willis Thomas invite us to reconsider history through themes of struggle in ways that resonate with Lawrence?s artistic invention. Statements by these artists amplify how they and Lawrence view history not as distant period of the past but as an active imaginative space that is continuously questioned in the present tense and for future audiences.
African American Masters by Gwen EverettThis is an accessible, reader-friendly introduction to 20th-century, African-American art, illustrated with works from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and published to accompany a touring exhibition. African-American art, and the works represented in this catalogue range from pioneer works created early in the century to important pieces from the Harlem Renaissance, to modern and contemporary selections. Full-page colour reproductions of paintings, sculpture and photography from artists such as Romare Bearden, Roy DeCarava, Faith Ringgold, John Biggers and Gordon Parks provide an introduction to this area of art.
ISBN: 0810945118
Publication Date: 2003
Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance by Amy Helene Kirschke (Editor)Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with issues that were unique to both their gender and their race. They experienced racial prejudice, which limited their ability to obtain training and to be taken seriously as working artists. They also encountered prevailing sexism, often an even more serious barrier. Including seventy-two black and white illustrations, this book chronicles the challenges of women artists, who are in some cases unknown to the general public, and places their achievements in the artistic and cultural context of early twentieth-century America. Contributors to this first book on the women artists of the Harlem Renaissance proclaim the legacy of Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Elizabeth Prophet, Lois Maillou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and many other painters, sculptors, and printmakers. In a time of more rigid gender roles, women artists faced the added struggle of raising families and attempting to gain support and encouragement from their often-reluctant spouses in order to pursue their art. They also confronted the challenge of convincing their fellow male artists that they, too, should be seen as important contributors to the artistic innovation of the era.
ISBN: 9781626742079
Publication Date: 2014
I Too Sing America by Wil Haygood; Carole Genshaft (Contribution by); Anastasia Kinigopoulo (Contribution by); Nannette V. Maciejunes (Contribution by); Drew Sawyer (Contribution by)Winner of the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History, I Too Sing America offers a major survey on the visual art and material culture of the groundbreaking movement one hundred years after the Harlem Renaissance emerged as a creative force at the close of World War I. It illuminates multiple facets of the era--the lives of its people, the art, the literature, the music, and the social history--through paintings, prints, photography, sculpture, and contemporary documents and ephemera. The lushly illustrated chronicle includes work by cherished artists such as Romare Bearden, Allan Rohan Crite, Palmer Hayden, William Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, and James Van Der Zee. The project is the culmination of decades of reflection, research, and scholarship by Wil Haygood, acclaimed biographer and preeminent historian on Harlem and its cultural roots. In thematic chapters, the author captures the range and breadth of the Harlem Reniassance, a sweeping movement which saw an astonishing array of black writers and artists and musicians gather over a period of a few intense years, expanding far beyond its roots in Harlem to unleashing a myriad of talents upon the nation. The book is published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art.
ISBN: 9780847863129
Publication Date: 2018
Augusta Savage by Bridget R. Cooks (Contribution by); Kirsten Pai Buick (Contribution by); Jeffreen M. HayesThis is a timely, visual, exploration of the fascinating life and lasting legacy of sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962), who overcame poverty, racism, and sexual discrimination to become one of America's most influential twentieth-century artists. Her story is one of community-building, activism, and art education. Born just outside Jacksonville, Florida, Savage left the South to pursue new opportunities and opened a studio in Harlem, New York City, offering free art classes. She co-founded the Harlem Artists' Guild in 1935 and became the first director of the federally-supported Harlem Community Art Center. Through her leadership there, Savage played an instrumental role in the development of many artists: William Artis, Gwendolyn Knight, Gwendolyn Bennett, Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Blackburn, Romare Bearden, among many others. This ground-breaking volume features fifty works by Savage, and those she mentored or influenced, as well as correspondence and period photographs.
Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982 by Lowery Stokes Sims; Wifredo LamWith its signature style that marries Cubism and Surrealism with Afro-Cuban and Caribbean motifs, the art of Wifredo Lam occupies a unique position in the history of modern art. Like many modern artists, specifically Pablo Picasso, Lam participated in the primitivist movement, drawing inspiration and imagery from non-western, pre-technological cultures. Yet, unlike European and Euroamerican primitivists, Lam, who was a Cuban of Spanish, African, and Chinese descent, was engaging with his own cultural heritage in his works. His authenticity as both "primitive" and "primitivist" challenges the fundamental tenets of primitivism and makes Lam an ambiguous, fascinating figure in twentieth-century art. This wide-ranging study explores Lam’s enduring contribution to world art history—the reclamation and projection of an African identity within mainstream art. Lowery Stokes Sims surveys Lam’s work, focusing on the period from 1947 onwards, in which he demonstrated the viability of nationalist pursuits within modernism to a new generation of artists. She traces his career and life and the critical reception of his work in Cuba and Latin America, the United States, and Europe as each locale predominated in his career. This masterly assessment of Lam’s later work demonstrates the evolution of primitivist concepts in modern art from the specifically ethnographic to the more psychic and existential. What emerges from Lam’s story is the fate of Surrealism in the postwar era as it permutated into international artistic movements such as the CoBrA, the Group Phases, and the International Situationists.
ISBN: 0292777507
Publication Date: 2002
Wifredo Lam in North America by Wifredo Lam (Illustrator); Edward Lucie-Smith (Contribution by)In the winter of 2007, Milwaukee's Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, organized and hosted the first American retrospective exhibition of Cuba's favorite Surrealist, Wifredo Lam (1902-1992). Lam's paintings craft Surrealist conjunctions from Cuban religious iconography--especially from tribal masks--and retrieve a suppressed Afro-Cuban culture that ultimately sets them apart from any movement. "With all my energy I sought to paint the drama of my country, but most of all to lend expression to the spirit of Negro man, the beauty of Negro plastic art," he once declared. This exhibition catalogue celebrates the role that North American museums, galleries and private collectors have played in bringing about a renaissance of interest in Lam's art. It particularly addresses the role of Lam's Afro-Cuban ethnicity in the development of his unusual hybridized vocabulary, a blend of Paris School, Surrealist and Afro-Cuban aesthetics. All of these issues are raised in essays by an impressive line-up of scholars, including Dawn Ades, Edward Lucie-Smith, Lou Luarin-Lam (Wifredo's widow), Curtis L. Carter, Valerie Fletcher and Lowery Stokes Sims. Wifredo Lam in America features over 60 representative drawings and paintings from North American collections.
ISBN: 0945366221
Publication Date: 2008
Wifredo Lam by Elizabeth GoizuetaWifredo Lam (1902?82) was born in Cuba to parents of Chinese, African, and Spanish descent?thus giving him ties to four continents, links that would all reveal their influences in his artwork. This volume accompanies an exhibition of Lam's work at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College that highlights his heretofore underappreciated Spanish influences, revealing their undeniable presence in several of his greatest works. Featuring paintings from all his major periods, and critical essays that set his work in context, the book offers a surprising new angle on a much-loved artist.
ISBN: 9781892850232
Publication Date: 2014
Wifredo Lam by Catherine David (Editor)One of the most important figures in global modernism, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) traveled extensively in Europe in the 1930s, where he intersected with many of the 20th century's greatest artists, most significantly Picasso. He returned to Cuba in 1942, where he nurtured his personal connection to Afro-Cuban iconography and spirit, combining modernism with the vitality and force of the native culture. Initially viewed as "dangerously savage," his work is now recognized as essential viewing among his contemporaries. A major retrospective at Tate Modern showcases his singular career from the 1930s to the 1970s, with particular focus on his first encounter with Picasso in 1938 to his return to Europe in 1952. Dazzlingly illustrated with more than 300 works, including paintings, drawings and photographs, this beautiful book celebrates the life and creative contribution of a remarkable artist.
ISBN: 9781849763721
Publication Date: 2016
Race Anthropology and Politics in the Work of Wifredo Lam by Claude CernuschiThis book reinterprets Wifredo Lam's work with particular attention to its political implications, focusing on how these implications emerge from the artist's critical engagement with 20th-century anthropology. Field work conducted in Cuba, including the witnessing of actual Afro-Cuban religious ritual ceremonies and information collected from informants, enhances the interpretive background against which we can construe the meanings of Lam's art. In the process, Claude Cernuschi argues that Lam hoped to fashion a new hybrid style to foster pride and dignity in the Afro-Cuban community, as well as counteract the acute racism of Cuban culture.
New Currents, Ancient Rivers by Jean Kennedy"Although modern African literature and music have become well known in the West, through the contributions of such famous authors as Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head and such popular musicians as King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the continent's vast body of modern visual arts has been little explored." "In New Currents, Ancient Rivers Jean Kennedy surveys African art of the last fifty years, offering an expansive perspective on the visual arts of the continent. Just as ancient rivers flow through the modern African landscape, so too do the rituals and traditions of the past run deeply through modern African art. The past is able to coexist in vibrant synthesis with the present largely because of a critical constant in African culture, the acceptance of change." "The culmination of twenty years' research, New Currents, Ancient Rivers is the largest survey of contemporary African art, presenting nearly 150 artists of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and South Africa--painters, sculptors, fiber artists, printmakers, and filmmakers. As Kennedy examines their artistic development, she shows the many ways the artists meld elements from modern life, the legacy of colonialism, foreign technology, the natural world, and the past to create art that may be divorced from the original purposes of ritual but that still embraces traditional rhythms. The author also briefly discusses the influence of the oral and literary traditions on the visual arts." "New Currents, Ancient Rivers is a tribute to the vitality and diversity of a continent and its peoples. This progressive book recognizes individual artists, many of whom are virtually unknown in Europe and the United States."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
New Traditions from Nigeria by Simon OttenbergIn this detailed study of seven contemporary artists associated with Nigeria's Nsukka group, Simon Ottenberg explores the ways in which their diverse uses of uli, a traditional design system, have been informed by their relationships to Igbo culture, their experiences in the 1967-1970 civil war, their literary interests, and their influences on one another.
ISBN: 1560988002
Publication Date: 1997
Modern Art in Africa, Asia and Latin America by Melissa Chiu (Editor); Roberto Tejada (Editor); Everlyn Nicodemus (Editor); Benjamin Genocchio (Editor); Mary K. Coffey (Editor); Elaine O'Brien (Editor)Shedding fresh light on modern art beyond the West, this textintroduces readers to artists, art movements, debates andtheoretical positions of the modern era that continue to shapecontemporary art worldwide. Area histories of modern art arerepositioned and interconnected towards a global arthistoriography. Provides a much-needed corrective to the Eurocentrichistoriography of modern art, offering a more worldly and expandedview than any existing modern art survey Brings together a selection of major essays and historicaldocuments from a wide range of sources Section introductions, critical essays, and documents providethe relevant contextual and historiographical material, link theselections together, and guide the reader through the keytheoretical positions and debates Offers a useful tool for students and scholars with little orno prior knowledge of non-Western modernisms Includes many contrasting voices in its documents and essays,encouraging reader response and lively classroom discussion Includes a selection of major essays and historical documentsaddressing not only painting and sculpture but photography, filmand architecture as well.
Angaza Afrika by Christopher SpringThe mission of this book is to illustrate Africa's immensely fertile artistic landscape. Africa has emerged from its colonial past and is asserting its own identity. African art is not only confined to the continent itself, but has spread world-wide through the work of those descended from the enforced migrations of the slave trade and those who have more recently left their homesin Africa to take their place on an international stage. This book brings together more than 60 of Africa's most creative contemporary artists, drawn from across the African continent as well as from Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and South America. Their art leaps off the page with over 350 color images (many especially commissioned). In addition to painters, sculptors, and photographers, there are a number of artists whose work embraces performance and installation. Many of the materials they use are as unorthodox astheir imagery, with ready made and found objects.
Arts of Africa: Jean Pigozzi's Contemporary Collection by Andre Magnin (Editor); Grimaldi Forum (Monaco, Monaco) Staff (Contribution by)Nurtured by historic aesthetic roots, sub-Saharan African artists have continued to absorb and transform external influences in extraordinary ways. The Jean Pigozzi Collection, the best-endowed contemporary African art collection in the world, shows how the rich values, forms, and cultural history of Africa have been incorporated, even into new media. This catalog of the collection included in the Grimaldi Forum exhibition profiles the work of 30 leading artists-painters, photographers, sculptors, and video artists. The artists featured include Seydou Ke#65533;ta, Fr#65533;d#65533;ric Bruly Bouabr#65533;, Malick Sidib#65533;, Moke, Ch#65533;ri Samba, Romuald Hazoum#65533;, and Bodys Isek Kingelez.
El Anatsui at The Clark by El Anatsui; Chika Okeke-Agulu"The sculptor El Anatsui, born in Ghana in 1944, merges personal, local, and global concerns in his visual creations. Weaving together discarded aluminum tops from Nigerian liquor bottles, Anatsui creates large-scale sculptures called gawu (metal or fashioned cloth in the artists first language) that demonstrate a fascinating interplay of color, shape, and fluidity."Anatsu
ISBN: 9781935998020
Publication Date: 2011
El Anatsui by Lisa M. Binder (Editor)El Anatsu began his artistic career as a young artist in Ghana, where he built sculpture primarily from wood. He has continued to use wood throughout his practice, particularly during his early years as lecturer of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. As his art grew, so too did the range of his materials. Over three decades he has incorporated found metal and other media, infusing the work with references to personal, cultural, and global histories. At the Venice Biennale in 2007 El Anatsui stunned the world with two monumental sculptures made from thousands of liquor-bottle tops stretched between columns. This career retrospective includes a selection of the artist?s most important objects, including ceramic, wood, and metal pieces as well as rare paintings, prints, and drawings that complement his sculpture. This is the most comprehensive examination of Anatsui?s work to date.
ISBN: 9780945802563
Publication Date: 2011
El Anatsui by Susan M. VogelThis book on the celebrated Ghanaian artist El Anatsui explores the artist's life and the trajectory of his remarkable career. An African artist who has garnered worldwide recognition while based permanently in Nigeria, El Anatsui is best known for shimmering tapestries made from liquor bottle tops, which are part of the permanent collections of many of the world's great museums. Author Susan M. Vogel, who worked closely with Anatsui while directing a documentary film about the artist, offers a uniquely personal perspective on Anatsui and provides the first penetrating study of his artworks. Accompanied by nearly 150 images, this book traces his lifelong exploration of media leading up to the bottle top art form that has captured the interest of the global art world. The book explores the artist's themes of loss, chaos, and decay, his Nigerian University intellectual community, and his creative studio practice. Vogel traces the intertwined threads of Anatsui's ideas, life, and art, from his youthful searching and desire to express Africa's history to today's work that can be immense and ethereal. ILLUSTRATION: 145 illustrations
Second Careers by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi; El Anatsui; Nnenna Okore; Zohra Opoku; Elias SimeAn important investigation of the complicated relationship between canonical African art and the practices of contemporary African artists Recognizing the second lives of historical African artworks when they enter museum collections and addressing them in dialogue with the works of six established and emerging African artists, this book represents how today's practitioners are reformulating the continent's artistic traditions to respond to the contemporary landscape. Historically, African art objects such as masks and sculptures were composed of a matrix of materials that included medicine bundles, raffia assemblage, hides, and metal, some or all of which were repurposed: a "second career" for the materials. This practice of transforming materials has wider cultural resonance in Africa today, where electronics, discarded engines, and rubber tires are incorporated by artisans into domestic and personal items. The contemporary African artists featured here--El Anatsui (Ghana), Nnenna Okore (Nigeria), Zohra Opoku (Ghana), Elias Sime (Ethiopia), Tahir Carl Karmali (Kenya), and Gonçalo Mabunda (Mozambique)--reflect these dual traditions, reviving conceptual elements of historical African art by creating work that responds to the evolution of Africa's artistic traditions.]]>
ISBN: 0300246870
Publication Date: 2020
Personal Affects by Sophie Perryer (Editor)This 128-page supplement to the Personal Affects catalogue features photographs and an essay documenting the exhibition and performances at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the Museum for African Art, New York.
ISBN: 9780945802440
Publication Date: 2005
South African Art Now by Sue WilliamsonDescribed by international curator Okwui Enwezor as "one of the most dynamic and vigorous spaces of artistic practice," contemporary South African art is an exciting, emerging scene that is attracting the attention of international museums, curators, and collectors today. South African Art Now documents, through in-depth essays and stunning full-color photographs, the remarkable work of nearly one hundred South African artists working in every medium from painting, sculpture, and video to cutting-edge performance art. This lush volume includes the impressive work of art world stars such as William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas; newly prominent artists such as Berni Searle, Robin Rhode, and Mustafa Maluka; and exciting newcomers still unknown outside their own country, but clearly marked for success. This book covers forty years of art history, from the dark years of apartheid, which saw the rise of resistance art, to the long-awaited achievement of freedom in 1994, to the present-day struggles for reconciliation and transformation. Through it all, the engaged, powerful work of these artists provided a mirror for society. Including a compelling foreword by Nobel Prize-winning writer Nadine Gordimer, South African Art Now is a must-have resource for collectors, curators, and anyone interested in the pulse of international contemporary art.
ISBN: 9780061343513
Publication Date: 2009
Figures and Fictions by Tamar Garb'Figures and Fictions' presents the work of 17 South African photographers, all of whom are currently living and working in the country. It features works produced between 2000 and 2010, as the first flush of post-democratic euphoria begins to fade. While the old fixed categories of 'black and white' no longer hold, they have not easily been displaced by the ideal of a post-racial 'rainbow nation' of citizens and subjects. In this fascinating and fraught political context, a new generation of outstanding photographers have joined the established doyens of South African image makers to produce startling and compelling work. The book and exhibition include renowned practitioners David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng, mid-career stars Guy Tillim, Pieter Hugo, Zwelethu Methethwa, Berni Searle, Jodi Bieber, and Terry Kurgan, and newcomers to the international stage Zanele Muholi, Hassan and Husain Essop, Roelof van Wyk, Graeme Williams, Kudzanai Chiurai, and Sabelo Mlangeni.
Home/Land by Marion Arnold (Editor); Marsha Meskimmon (Editor)Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies is an extensive compendium of texts and images, combining scholarly, creative and critical writing on photography with new work in photography. The contributions to the compendium range from academic essays on fine art and documentary photographies to photo-essays, community-based and pedagogical photographic projects, personal testimonies, creative writing, activist interventions and accounts of participatory action research using photography. Home/Land is global in its reach, exploring women's lives in Britain and other European nations, the United States, Canada, the Middle East, South Africa, Asia and Australia. Bringing together texts and images produced by an international group of feminist scholars, activists, artists and educators, the book demonstrates how women have used photographic practices to find places for themselves as citizens, denizens, exiles or guests, within or beyond the nation as currently conceived, and, in so doing, how they actively produce new and different forms of identity, community and belonging.
ISBN: 9781781382806
Publication Date: 2016
Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa by Dominic Willsdon (Editor); Betti-Sue Hertz (Editor); Frank Smigiel (Editor)Public Intimacy brings together 25 artists and collectives who disrupt expected images of a country known largely through its apartheid history. The book presents a critical sensibility that existed but was mostly overlooked during apartheid, and which is now shared by many artists and writers of a new generation--the expression of the poetics and politics of the "ordinary act." Public Intimacy includes works by Ian Berry, Chimurenga, Ernest Cole, DavidGoldblatt, Handspring Puppet Company, Nicholas Hlobo, ijusi (Garth Walker), Anton Kannemeyer, William Kentridge, Donna Kukama, Terry Kurgan, Sabelo Mlangeni, Santu Mofokeng, Billy Monk, Anthea Moys, Zanele Muholi, Sello Pesa and Vaughn Sadie, Cameron Platter, Lindeka Qampi, Jo Ractliffe, Athi-Patra Ruga, Berni Searle, Penny Siopis, Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse and Kemang Wa Lehulere.
Angaza Afrika by Christopher SpringThe mission of this book is to illustrate Africa's immensely fertile artistic landscape. Africa has emerged from its colonial past and is asserting its own identity. African art is not only confined to the continent itself, but has spread world-wide through the work of those descended from the enforced migrations of the slave trade and those who have more recently left their homesin Africa to take their place on an international stage. This book brings together more than 60 of Africa's most creative contemporary artists, drawn from across the African continent as well as from Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and South America. Their art leaps off the page with over 350 color images (many especially commissioned). In addition to painters, sculptors, and photographers, there are a number of artists whose work embraces performance and installation. Many of the materials they use are as unorthodox astheir imagery, with ready made and found objects.
ISBN: 9781856695480
Publication Date: 2008
Drawing People: the Human Figure in Contemporary Art by Roger Malbert (Text by)How contemporary artists draw the human figure in an affordable, up-to-date and well-illustrated survey, covering an eclectic range of drawing styles and media Drawing People is a thoughtful and beautifully illustrated survey of the most compelling and inventive drawings of the human form being produced today by 70 contemporary artists from around the world. An introduction places the medium of drawing in its historical context, discussing its intersection with photography, painting, collage and illustration, as well as its ability to intimately express thought, personality and emotion, as well as fundamental questions about identity. Five chapters-Body, Self, Personal Lives, Social Reality and Fictions-include short introductions outlining each theme, followed by generously illustrated profiles on individual artists exploring their style, approach to the medium and the ideas, narratives and inspirations that lie behind their mark-making. A selection of finely reproduced images highlights the latest work by each artist. Drawing People features an international roster of artists working with pencil, ink, watercolor, charcoal and crayon, including Francis Alÿs, Charles Avery, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Adam Dant, Marlene Dumas, Dr. Lakra, Paul McCarthy, Nalini Malani, Wangechi Mutu, Raymond Pettibon, Rosemarie Trockel, Tal R, Marcel Dzama, Barry McGee, Amy Sillman and Kara Walker. Together, their drawings and sketches, illustrations and animations bring to life one of the most creatively rich and emotionally powerful forms of art being made today. An essential book for students and practicing artists.
Nick Cave by Denise Markonish; David Byrne (Contribution by); Lori E. Lightfoot (Contribution by); Claudia Rankine (Contribution by)Nick Cave's "Soundsuits"- exuberant, brightly colored wearable sculptures adorned with buttons, hair, toys and other found objects-have made him one of the best-known contemporary artists. This book documents his most extensive work to date, turning his art inside out. Until fills MASS MoCA's football field-sized gallery, without a single Soundsuit to be found. Instead Cave takes us inside the belly of one of his iconic sculptures with an immersive environment populated by a dazzling array of found objects, echoing some of Cave's and America's most confounding dilemmas: gun violence, racial inequality, injustice within our cities' police departments, and death. An installation diary and numerous images reveal how an idea becomes reality. Until also incorporates special appearances by dancers, singer/ songwriters, and poets, as well as community forums, and opportunities for public debate and engagement. Transcripts of the first of these events accompany the book's illustrations. This book features an essay by exhibition Curator Denise Markonish, commentary by David Byrne and Lori E. Lightfoot that contextualizes Cave's work against today's headlines, and an excerpt from Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. Powerful and transformative, Until promises to take its place among the era's most important artistic statements.Published in association with MASS MoCA. AUTHOR: Denise Markonish is Curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. David Byrne is a singer, songwriter and musician based in New York. Lori E. Lightfoot heads the Police Board and Task Force on Police Accountability in Chicago. Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright teaching at Pomona College in Claremont, California. 200 colour illustrations
Harriet and the Promised Land by
A brief biography in verse about Harriet Tubman and her dedicated efforts to lead her fellow slaves to freedom.
ISBN: 0671866737Publication Date: 1993
Jacob Lawrence by
Briefly describes Lawrence's life and career, shows thirteen of his major paintings, and includes comments on their composition.
ISBN: 0847815153Publication Date: 1993
The Great Migration by
After an introduction from the artist about the migration of blacks from the rural areas in the South to the urban, industrialized North, there follows a collection of paintings that capture images of these events. A brief text connects the pictures, which were painted in the early 1940s. These are powerful images showing the difficulties of the journey as well as the strong support of families & friends. Many audiences will want to examine this visual history. A poem, "Migration" by Walter Dean Myers, follows the illustrations.
ISBN: 0060230371Publication Date: 1993
Over the Line by
Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence includes essays by eight distinguished art historians examining the ways in which Jacob Lawrence's art speaks so powerfully to different audiences. It is the first multi-author, in-depth probe of the artist's entire career: the nature of his work, his education, the critical climate in which he worked, and his use of materials and techniques. It reproduces, in full color, more than 200 works, most of which have not been published in color, or at all, in other books on the artist. An extensive chronology, collating events in his life with his public reception -- including selected exhibitions, publications, honors, and awards -- is illustrated with family photographs. Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) spent his childhood in New York City, attending classes at the Harlem Community Art Center and the American Artists School, and later working for the Federal Art Project. While still in his twenties Lawrence exhibited his paintings at major museums across the country, including the Phillips Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he became the first African American artist represented in the permanent collection. He lived, painted, and taught in New York City until 1971, when he moved to Seattle to join the faculty of the University of Washington. He was the recipient of numerous awards including the National Medal of Arts. The paperback edition of Over the Line is published in conjunction with a major exhibition opening at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, on May 26, 2001, and traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
ISBN: 029597964XPublication Date: 2000
Painting Harlem Modern by
Jacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. In Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills renders a vivid assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. She argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists. She also uniquely positions Lawrence alongside such important African American writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Drawing from a wide range of archival materials and interviews with artists, Hills interprets Lawrence's art as distilled from a life of struggle and perseverance. She brings insightful analysis to his work, beginning with the 1930s street scenes that provided Harlem with its pictorial image, and follows each decade of Lawrence's work, with accounts that include his impressions of Southern Jim Crow segregation and a groundbreaking discussion of Lawrence's symbolic use of masks and masking during the 1950s Cold War era. Painting Harlem Modern is an absorbing book that highlights Lawrence's heroic efforts to meet his many challenges while remaining true to his humanist values and artistic vision.
ISBN: 9780520252417Publication Date: 2010
Jacob Lawrence by
This publication sets the precedent for the next generation of Lawrence scholars and studies in modern and contemporary discourse. The American Struggle explores Jacob Lawrence?s radical way of transforming history into art by looking at his thirty panel series of paintings, Struggle . . . from the History of the American People (1954?56). Essays by Steven Locke, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Austen Barron Bailly, and Lydia Gordon mark the historic reunion of this series?seen together in this exhibition for the first time since 1958. In entries on the panels, a multitude of voices responds to the episodes representing struggle from American history that Lawrence chose to activate in his series. The American Struggle reexamines Lawrence?s lost narrative and its power for twenty-first century audiences by including contemporary art and artists. Derrick Adams, Bethany Collins, and Hank Willis Thomas invite us to reconsider history through themes of struggle in ways that resonate with Lawrence?s artistic invention. Statements by these artists amplify how they and Lawrence view history not as distant period of the past but as an active imaginative space that is continuously questioned in the present tense and for future audiences.
ISBN: 9780295747040Publication Date: 2019
African American Masters by
This is an accessible, reader-friendly introduction to 20th-century, African-American art, illustrated with works from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and published to accompany a touring exhibition. African-American art, and the works represented in this catalogue range from pioneer works created early in the century to important pieces from the Harlem Renaissance, to modern and contemporary selections. Full-page colour reproductions of paintings, sculpture and photography from artists such as Romare Bearden, Roy DeCarava, Faith Ringgold, John Biggers and Gordon Parks provide an introduction to this area of art.
ISBN: 0810945118Publication Date: 2003
Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance by
Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with issues that were unique to both their gender and their race. They experienced racial prejudice, which limited their ability to obtain training and to be taken seriously as working artists. They also encountered prevailing sexism, often an even more serious barrier. Including seventy-two black and white illustrations, this book chronicles the challenges of women artists, who are in some cases unknown to the general public, and places their achievements in the artistic and cultural context of early twentieth-century America. Contributors to this first book on the women artists of the Harlem Renaissance proclaim the legacy of Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Elizabeth Prophet, Lois Maillou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and many other painters, sculptors, and printmakers. In a time of more rigid gender roles, women artists faced the added struggle of raising families and attempting to gain support and encouragement from their often-reluctant spouses in order to pursue their art. They also confronted the challenge of convincing their fellow male artists that they, too, should be seen as important contributors to the artistic innovation of the era.
ISBN: 9781626742079Publication Date: 2014
I Too Sing America by
Winner of the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History, I Too Sing America offers a major survey on the visual art and material culture of the groundbreaking movement one hundred years after the Harlem Renaissance emerged as a creative force at the close of World War I. It illuminates multiple facets of the era--the lives of its people, the art, the literature, the music, and the social history--through paintings, prints, photography, sculpture, and contemporary documents and ephemera. The lushly illustrated chronicle includes work by cherished artists such as Romare Bearden, Allan Rohan Crite, Palmer Hayden, William Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, and James Van Der Zee. The project is the culmination of decades of reflection, research, and scholarship by Wil Haygood, acclaimed biographer and preeminent historian on Harlem and its cultural roots. In thematic chapters, the author captures the range and breadth of the Harlem Reniassance, a sweeping movement which saw an astonishing array of black writers and artists and musicians gather over a period of a few intense years, expanding far beyond its roots in Harlem to unleashing a myriad of talents upon the nation. The book is published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art.
ISBN: 9780847863129Publication Date: 2018
Augusta Savage by
This is a timely, visual, exploration of the fascinating life and lasting legacy of sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962), who overcame poverty, racism, and sexual discrimination to become one of America's most influential twentieth-century artists. Her story is one of community-building, activism, and art education. Born just outside Jacksonville, Florida, Savage left the South to pursue new opportunities and opened a studio in Harlem, New York City, offering free art classes. She co-founded the Harlem Artists' Guild in 1935 and became the first director of the federally-supported Harlem Community Art Center. Through her leadership there, Savage played an instrumental role in the development of many artists: William Artis, Gwendolyn Knight, Gwendolyn Bennett, Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Blackburn, Romare Bearden, among many others. This ground-breaking volume features fifty works by Savage, and those she mentored or influenced, as well as correspondence and period photographs.
ISBN: 9781911282228Publication Date: 2018
Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982 by
With its signature style that marries Cubism and Surrealism with Afro-Cuban and Caribbean motifs, the art of Wifredo Lam occupies a unique position in the history of modern art. Like many modern artists, specifically Pablo Picasso, Lam participated in the primitivist movement, drawing inspiration and imagery from non-western, pre-technological cultures. Yet, unlike European and Euroamerican primitivists, Lam, who was a Cuban of Spanish, African, and Chinese descent, was engaging with his own cultural heritage in his works. His authenticity as both "primitive" and "primitivist" challenges the fundamental tenets of primitivism and makes Lam an ambiguous, fascinating figure in twentieth-century art. This wide-ranging study explores Lam’s enduring contribution to world art history—the reclamation and projection of an African identity within mainstream art. Lowery Stokes Sims surveys Lam’s work, focusing on the period from 1947 onwards, in which he demonstrated the viability of nationalist pursuits within modernism to a new generation of artists. She traces his career and life and the critical reception of his work in Cuba and Latin America, the United States, and Europe as each locale predominated in his career. This masterly assessment of Lam’s later work demonstrates the evolution of primitivist concepts in modern art from the specifically ethnographic to the more psychic and existential. What emerges from Lam’s story is the fate of Surrealism in the postwar era as it permutated into international artistic movements such as the CoBrA, the Group Phases, and the International Situationists.
ISBN: 0292777507Publication Date: 2002
Wifredo Lam in North America by
In the winter of 2007, Milwaukee's Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, organized and hosted the first American retrospective exhibition of Cuba's favorite Surrealist, Wifredo Lam (1902-1992). Lam's paintings craft Surrealist conjunctions from Cuban religious iconography--especially from tribal masks--and retrieve a suppressed Afro-Cuban culture that ultimately sets them apart from any movement. "With all my energy I sought to paint the drama of my country, but most of all to lend expression to the spirit of Negro man, the beauty of Negro plastic art," he once declared. This exhibition catalogue celebrates the role that North American museums, galleries and private collectors have played in bringing about a renaissance of interest in Lam's art. It particularly addresses the role of Lam's Afro-Cuban ethnicity in the development of his unusual hybridized vocabulary, a blend of Paris School, Surrealist and Afro-Cuban aesthetics. All of these issues are raised in essays by an impressive line-up of scholars, including Dawn Ades, Edward Lucie-Smith, Lou Luarin-Lam (Wifredo's widow), Curtis L. Carter, Valerie Fletcher and Lowery Stokes Sims. Wifredo Lam in America features over 60 representative drawings and paintings from North American collections.
ISBN: 0945366221Publication Date: 2008
Wifredo Lam by
Wifredo Lam (1902?82) was born in Cuba to parents of Chinese, African, and Spanish descent?thus giving him ties to four continents, links that would all reveal their influences in his artwork. This volume accompanies an exhibition of Lam's work at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College that highlights his heretofore underappreciated Spanish influences, revealing their undeniable presence in several of his greatest works. Featuring paintings from all his major periods, and critical essays that set his work in context, the book offers a surprising new angle on a much-loved artist.
ISBN: 9781892850232Publication Date: 2014
Wifredo Lam by
One of the most important figures in global modernism, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) traveled extensively in Europe in the 1930s, where he intersected with many of the 20th century's greatest artists, most significantly Picasso. He returned to Cuba in 1942, where he nurtured his personal connection to Afro-Cuban iconography and spirit, combining modernism with the vitality and force of the native culture. Initially viewed as "dangerously savage," his work is now recognized as essential viewing among his contemporaries. A major retrospective at Tate Modern showcases his singular career from the 1930s to the 1970s, with particular focus on his first encounter with Picasso in 1938 to his return to Europe in 1952. Dazzlingly illustrated with more than 300 works, including paintings, drawings and photographs, this beautiful book celebrates the life and creative contribution of a remarkable artist.
ISBN: 9781849763721Publication Date: 2016
Race Anthropology and Politics in the Work of Wifredo Lam by
This book reinterprets Wifredo Lam's work with particular attention to its political implications, focusing on how these implications emerge from the artist's critical engagement with 20th-century anthropology. Field work conducted in Cuba, including the witnessing of actual Afro-Cuban religious ritual ceremonies and information collected from informants, enhances the interpretive background against which we can construe the meanings of Lam's art. In the process, Claude Cernuschi argues that Lam hoped to fashion a new hybrid style to foster pride and dignity in the Afro-Cuban community, as well as counteract the acute racism of Cuban culture.
ISBN: 9780815393740Publication Date: 2019
Drawings of Uche Okeke by
Publication Date: 1961
New Currents, Ancient Rivers by
"Although modern African literature and music have become well known in the West, through the contributions of such famous authors as Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head and such popular musicians as King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the continent's vast body of modern visual arts has been little explored." "In New Currents, Ancient Rivers Jean Kennedy surveys African art of the last fifty years, offering an expansive perspective on the visual arts of the continent. Just as ancient rivers flow through the modern African landscape, so too do the rituals and traditions of the past run deeply through modern African art. The past is able to coexist in vibrant synthesis with the present largely because of a critical constant in African culture, the acceptance of change." "The culmination of twenty years' research, New Currents, Ancient Rivers is the largest survey of contemporary African art, presenting nearly 150 artists of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and South Africa--painters, sculptors, fiber artists, printmakers, and filmmakers. As Kennedy examines their artistic development, she shows the many ways the artists meld elements from modern life, the legacy of colonialism, foreign technology, the natural world, and the past to create art that may be divorced from the original purposes of ritual but that still embraces traditional rhythms. The author also briefly discusses the influence of the oral and literary traditions on the visual arts." "New Currents, Ancient Rivers is a tribute to the vitality and diversity of a continent and its peoples. This progressive book recognizes individual artists, many of whom are virtually unknown in Europe and the United States."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1560980370Publication Date: 1992
New Traditions from Nigeria by
In this detailed study of seven contemporary artists associated with Nigeria's Nsukka group, Simon Ottenberg explores the ways in which their diverse uses of uli, a traditional design system, have been informed by their relationships to Igbo culture, their experiences in the 1967-1970 civil war, their literary interests, and their influences on one another.
ISBN: 1560988002Publication Date: 1997
Modern Art in Africa, Asia and Latin America by
Shedding fresh light on modern art beyond the West, this textintroduces readers to artists, art movements, debates andtheoretical positions of the modern era that continue to shapecontemporary art worldwide. Area histories of modern art arerepositioned and interconnected towards a global arthistoriography. Provides a much-needed corrective to the Eurocentrichistoriography of modern art, offering a more worldly and expandedview than any existing modern art survey Brings together a selection of major essays and historicaldocuments from a wide range of sources Section introductions, critical essays, and documents providethe relevant contextual and historiographical material, link theselections together, and guide the reader through the keytheoretical positions and debates Offers a useful tool for students and scholars with little orno prior knowledge of non-Western modernisms Includes many contrasting voices in its documents and essays,encouraging reader response and lively classroom discussion Includes a selection of major essays and historical documentsaddressing not only painting and sculpture but photography, filmand architecture as well.
ISBN: 9781444332292Publication Date: 2012
Contemporary Art from Cuba and Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island by ISBN: 092944504XPublication Date: 1999
Angaza Afrika by
The mission of this book is to illustrate Africa's immensely fertile artistic landscape. Africa has emerged from its colonial past and is asserting its own identity. African art is not only confined to the continent itself, but has spread world-wide through the work of those descended from the enforced migrations of the slave trade and those who have more recently left their homesin Africa to take their place on an international stage. This book brings together more than 60 of Africa's most creative contemporary artists, drawn from across the African continent as well as from Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and South America. Their art leaps off the page with over 350 color images (many especially commissioned). In addition to painters, sculptors, and photographers, there are a number of artists whose work embraces performance and installation. Many of the materials they use are as unorthodox astheir imagery, with ready made and found objects.
ISBN: 9781856695480Publication Date: 2008
Cuba Libre: Contemporary Art in Cuba Since Peter Ludwig by ISBN: 9788836634484Publication Date: 2016
Arts of Africa: Jean Pigozzi's Contemporary Collection by
Nurtured by historic aesthetic roots, sub-Saharan African artists have continued to absorb and transform external influences in extraordinary ways. The Jean Pigozzi Collection, the best-endowed contemporary African art collection in the world, shows how the rich values, forms, and cultural history of Africa have been incorporated, even into new media. This catalog of the collection included in the Grimaldi Forum exhibition profiles the work of 30 leading artists-painters, photographers, sculptors, and video artists. The artists featured include Seydou Ke#65533;ta, Fr#65533;d#65533;ric Bruly Bouabr#65533;, Malick Sidib#65533;, Moke, Ch#65533;ri Samba, Romuald Hazoum#65533;, and Bodys Isek Kingelez.
ISBN: 8876242961Publication Date: 2005
El Anatsui at The Clark by
"The sculptor El Anatsui, born in Ghana in 1944, merges personal, local, and global concerns in his visual creations. Weaving together discarded aluminum tops from Nigerian liquor bottles, Anatsui creates large-scale sculptures called gawu (metal or fashioned cloth in the artists first language) that demonstrate a fascinating interplay of color, shape, and fluidity."Anatsu
ISBN: 9781935998020Publication Date: 2011
El Anatsui by
El Anatsu began his artistic career as a young artist in Ghana, where he built sculpture primarily from wood. He has continued to use wood throughout his practice, particularly during his early years as lecturer of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. As his art grew, so too did the range of his materials. Over three decades he has incorporated found metal and other media, infusing the work with references to personal, cultural, and global histories. At the Venice Biennale in 2007 El Anatsui stunned the world with two monumental sculptures made from thousands of liquor-bottle tops stretched between columns. This career retrospective includes a selection of the artist?s most important objects, including ceramic, wood, and metal pieces as well as rare paintings, prints, and drawings that complement his sculpture. This is the most comprehensive examination of Anatsui?s work to date.
ISBN: 9780945802563Publication Date: 2011
El Anatsui by
This book on the celebrated Ghanaian artist El Anatsui explores the artist's life and the trajectory of his remarkable career. An African artist who has garnered worldwide recognition while based permanently in Nigeria, El Anatsui is best known for shimmering tapestries made from liquor bottle tops, which are part of the permanent collections of many of the world's great museums. Author Susan M. Vogel, who worked closely with Anatsui while directing a documentary film about the artist, offers a uniquely personal perspective on Anatsui and provides the first penetrating study of his artworks. Accompanied by nearly 150 images, this book traces his lifelong exploration of media leading up to the bottle top art form that has captured the interest of the global art world. The book explores the artist's themes of loss, chaos, and decay, his Nigerian University intellectual community, and his creative studio practice. Vogel traces the intertwined threads of Anatsui's ideas, life, and art, from his youthful searching and desire to express Africa's history to today's work that can be immense and ethereal. ILLUSTRATION: 145 illustrations
ISBN: 9783791346502Publication Date: 2012
Second Careers by
An important investigation of the complicated relationship between canonical African art and the practices of contemporary African artists Recognizing the second lives of historical African artworks when they enter museum collections and addressing them in dialogue with the works of six established and emerging African artists, this book represents how today's practitioners are reformulating the continent's artistic traditions to respond to the contemporary landscape. Historically, African art objects such as masks and sculptures were composed of a matrix of materials that included medicine bundles, raffia assemblage, hides, and metal, some or all of which were repurposed: a "second career" for the materials. This practice of transforming materials has wider cultural resonance in Africa today, where electronics, discarded engines, and rubber tires are incorporated by artisans into domestic and personal items. The contemporary African artists featured here--El Anatsui (Ghana), Nnenna Okore (Nigeria), Zohra Opoku (Ghana), Elias Sime (Ethiopia), Tahir Carl Karmali (Kenya), and Gonçalo Mabunda (Mozambique)--reflect these dual traditions, reviving conceptual elements of historical African art by creating work that responds to the evolution of Africa's artistic traditions.]]>
ISBN: 0300246870Publication Date: 2020
Personal Affects by
This 128-page supplement to the Personal Affects catalogue features photographs and an essay documenting the exhibition and performances at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the Museum for African Art, New York.
ISBN: 9780945802440Publication Date: 2005
South African Art Now by
Described by international curator Okwui Enwezor as "one of the most dynamic and vigorous spaces of artistic practice," contemporary South African art is an exciting, emerging scene that is attracting the attention of international museums, curators, and collectors today. South African Art Now documents, through in-depth essays and stunning full-color photographs, the remarkable work of nearly one hundred South African artists working in every medium from painting, sculpture, and video to cutting-edge performance art. This lush volume includes the impressive work of art world stars such as William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas; newly prominent artists such as Berni Searle, Robin Rhode, and Mustafa Maluka; and exciting newcomers still unknown outside their own country, but clearly marked for success. This book covers forty years of art history, from the dark years of apartheid, which saw the rise of resistance art, to the long-awaited achievement of freedom in 1994, to the present-day struggles for reconciliation and transformation. Through it all, the engaged, powerful work of these artists provided a mirror for society. Including a compelling foreword by Nobel Prize-winning writer Nadine Gordimer, South African Art Now is a must-have resource for collectors, curators, and anyone interested in the pulse of international contemporary art.
ISBN: 9780061343513Publication Date: 2009
Figures and Fictions by
'Figures and Fictions' presents the work of 17 South African photographers, all of whom are currently living and working in the country. It features works produced between 2000 and 2010, as the first flush of post-democratic euphoria begins to fade. While the old fixed categories of 'black and white' no longer hold, they have not easily been displaced by the ideal of a post-racial 'rainbow nation' of citizens and subjects. In this fascinating and fraught political context, a new generation of outstanding photographers have joined the established doyens of South African image makers to produce startling and compelling work. The book and exhibition include renowned practitioners David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng, mid-career stars Guy Tillim, Pieter Hugo, Zwelethu Methethwa, Berni Searle, Jodi Bieber, and Terry Kurgan, and newcomers to the international stage Zanele Muholi, Hassan and Husain Essop, Roelof van Wyk, Graeme Williams, Kudzanai Chiurai, and Sabelo Mlangeni.
ISBN: 3869302666Publication Date: 2011
Berni Searle: Bellagio Center Creative Arts Fellowship by Publication Date: 2015
Home/Land by
Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies is an extensive compendium of texts and images, combining scholarly, creative and critical writing on photography with new work in photography. The contributions to the compendium range from academic essays on fine art and documentary photographies to photo-essays, community-based and pedagogical photographic projects, personal testimonies, creative writing, activist interventions and accounts of participatory action research using photography. Home/Land is global in its reach, exploring women's lives in Britain and other European nations, the United States, Canada, the Middle East, South Africa, Asia and Australia. Bringing together texts and images produced by an international group of feminist scholars, activists, artists and educators, the book demonstrates how women have used photographic practices to find places for themselves as citizens, denizens, exiles or guests, within or beyond the nation as currently conceived, and, in so doing, how they actively produce new and different forms of identity, community and belonging.
ISBN: 9781781382806Publication Date: 2016
Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa by
Public Intimacy brings together 25 artists and collectives who disrupt expected images of a country known largely through its apartheid history. The book presents a critical sensibility that existed but was mostly overlooked during apartheid, and which is now shared by many artists and writers of a new generation--the expression of the poetics and politics of the "ordinary act." Public Intimacy includes works by Ian Berry, Chimurenga, Ernest Cole, DavidGoldblatt, Handspring Puppet Company, Nicholas Hlobo, ijusi (Garth Walker), Anton Kannemeyer, William Kentridge, Donna Kukama, Terry Kurgan, Sabelo Mlangeni, Santu Mofokeng, Billy Monk, Anthea Moys, Zanele Muholi, Sello Pesa and Vaughn Sadie, Cameron Platter, Lindeka Qampi, Jo Ractliffe, Athi-Patra Ruga, Berni Searle, Penny Siopis, Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse and Kemang Wa Lehulere.
ISBN: 9780982678978Publication Date: 2016
Drawing People: the Human Figure in Contemporary Art by
How contemporary artists draw the human figure in an affordable, up-to-date and well-illustrated survey, covering an eclectic range of drawing styles and media Drawing People is a thoughtful and beautifully illustrated survey of the most compelling and inventive drawings of the human form being produced today by 70 contemporary artists from around the world. An introduction places the medium of drawing in its historical context, discussing its intersection with photography, painting, collage and illustration, as well as its ability to intimately express thought, personality and emotion, as well as fundamental questions about identity. Five chapters-Body, Self, Personal Lives, Social Reality and Fictions-include short introductions outlining each theme, followed by generously illustrated profiles on individual artists exploring their style, approach to the medium and the ideas, narratives and inspirations that lie behind their mark-making. A selection of finely reproduced images highlights the latest work by each artist. Drawing People features an international roster of artists working with pencil, ink, watercolor, charcoal and crayon, including Francis Alÿs, Charles Avery, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Adam Dant, Marlene Dumas, Dr. Lakra, Paul McCarthy, Nalini Malani, Wangechi Mutu, Raymond Pettibon, Rosemarie Trockel, Tal R, Marcel Dzama, Barry McGee, Amy Sillman and Kara Walker. Together, their drawings and sketches, illustrations and animations bring to life one of the most creatively rich and emotionally powerful forms of art being made today. An essential book for students and practicing artists.
ISBN: 9781938922688Publication Date: 2015
Nick Cave by
Nick Cave's "Soundsuits"- exuberant, brightly colored wearable sculptures adorned with buttons, hair, toys and other found objects-have made him one of the best-known contemporary artists. This book documents his most extensive work to date, turning his art inside out. Until fills MASS MoCA's football field-sized gallery, without a single Soundsuit to be found. Instead Cave takes us inside the belly of one of his iconic sculptures with an immersive environment populated by a dazzling array of found objects, echoing some of Cave's and America's most confounding dilemmas: gun violence, racial inequality, injustice within our cities' police departments, and death. An installation diary and numerous images reveal how an idea becomes reality. Until also incorporates special appearances by dancers, singer/ songwriters, and poets, as well as community forums, and opportunities for public debate and engagement. Transcripts of the first of these events accompany the book's illustrations. This book features an essay by exhibition Curator Denise Markonish, commentary by David Byrne and Lori E. Lightfoot that contextualizes Cave's work against today's headlines, and an excerpt from Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. Powerful and transformative, Until promises to take its place among the era's most important artistic statements.Published in association with MASS MoCA. AUTHOR: Denise Markonish is Curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. David Byrne is a singer, songwriter and musician based in New York. Lori E. Lightfoot heads the Police Board and Task Force on Police Accountability in Chicago. Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright teaching at Pomona College in Claremont, California. 200 colour illustrations
ISBN: 9783791356051Publication Date: 2017